Warning: This story contains details that may disturb some readers.
A convicted serial child rapist has lost an attempt to get rid of his dangerous offender status in the B.C. Court of Appeal.
Ibata Noric Hexamer pleaded guilty in 2012 to six counts of sexual assault and unlawful confinement of children over 14 years.
The former Vancouver-based political organizer was handed an indeterminate sentence in 2016 — meaning his prison sentence would not have an end date, although the Parole Board of Canada would review the case after seven years and every two years after that — and the designation of ‘dangerous offender’.
In 2018, he appealed to have his guilty plea ruled invalid and asked for a new trial, saying his Charter rights were violated. That appeal was dismissed.
In his most recent appeal, he said the trial judge had made a number of errors in handing him the indeterminate sentence and the dangerous offender designation. He was seeking to have that designation removed, and to be given a 15-year sentence with a 2:1 credit for time served.
Hexamer also claimed the judge had shown bias against him. He claimed the expert who examined him “fudged” the data to “elevate his risk assessment scores”.
Justice Gregory James Fitch, who wrote the reasons for judgement on behalf of the Appeal Court panel, called those allegations “unsupported”.
“Allegations of bias or reasonable apprehension of bias on the part of a judge, or what amounts to professional misconduct on the part of an expert witness, are extremely serious. Such allegations should not be made cavalierly in the absence of some foundation that could reasonably support the claim,” the judgement reads.
“There is, in my view, nothing in the record of this proceeding that warranted the making of these allegations.”
The incidents happened in broad daylight in 1995, 2006 and 2009. The B.C. Court of Appeal judge said the offences were “predatory, violent and profoundly invasive of the physical integrity and emotional security of the young victims.
“The appellant dominated his victims, forcing them to perform or witness acts that inflicted significant psychological damage”.
The youngest of his victims was just six years old at the time; the oldest fourteen.
In the first incident, he pulled a 13-year old girl into a stairwell at Lord Tweedsmuir Elementary School in Vancouver. He attacked two young girls at knife-point in 2006, and in 2009 he assaulted a six-year old girl in a forested area in Surrey while her brother and his friend were forced to lie on the ground and look away.
He was finally arrested in 2010. Court documents from 2018 show he was caught when police officers visited his mother, posing as people doing a survey, and coaxed her into licking and sealing an envelope. The DNA sample from that incident matched with DNA Hexamer had left at the scenes of his crimes.
When he was arrested, almost 6,000 images showing child pornography were found on his laptop.
Before his arrest, Hexamer was a political organizer for the Vancouver civic party COPE. He also worked for the NDP in the Vancouver-Centre riding in the 2006 federal election.
— With files from Jeremy Lye and The Canadian Press
WATCH: (Feb. 20, 2019) Calgary rapist who photographed, posted attack online granted day parole
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